“Cowardly and Incendiary Partisans”: Soldier Mobs, Loyalty, and the Democratic Press in the Civil War

“Cowardly and Incendiary Partisans”: Soldier Mobs, Loyalty, and the Democratic Press in the Civil War Stefan I. Lund Minneapolis, Minnesota Bachelor of Arts, Oberlin College, 2016 A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia May 2019 “My knavish country, thee, Land where the thief is free, Thy laws I love, I love thy thieving bills That tap the people’s tills; I love thy mob whose will’s All laws above.” Ambrose Bierce, “A Rational Anthem,” 18821 INTRODUCTION On the afternoon of February 19th, 1863, about seventy-five convalescent Union soldiers from an army hospital at the small city of Keokuk, Iowa marched through town, making for the offices of the Daily Constitution. Once there, several of the group made their way inside, armed with sledgehammers. While their comrades formed a cordon in front of the building, the soldiers wielding hammers made a methodical attack upon the newspaper offices. Working from the ground floor up they spilled type, threw presses out of windows, and generally left the place “cleaned out.” A separate group of armed Union soldiers were dispatched by the provost guard to put an end to the violence, but the rioting soldiers outside refused to disperse, threatening their fellow soldiers with rifles and revolvers. Only once the destruction was complete would the convalescent soldiers consent to be led away. Part of one of the presses would later be recovered from the nearby Mississippi River.2 Mob violence against newspapers in the Civil War North was not uncommon. Broadly defined, such wartime attacks numbered well over a hundred. The practice of mobs attacking newspapers had a long history in the annals of the American press, dating back to the 1 Ambrose Bierce, Poems of Ambrose Bierce, ed., M.E. Grenander, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 18. 2 Chicago Tribune, February 21, 1863. 1 Revolution. During the antebellum years, northern states had experienced a variety of mob attacks on abolitionist newspapers, most notably in November 1837 when Elijah Lovejoy was killed defending his press from a mob in Alton, Illinois. During the Civil War, however, a significant feature differentiated dozens of mobs from their antebellum predecessors: the attackers wore the Union blue of their nation’s government. Loyal Americans struggled to explain why the same soldiers who were fighting rebels on the battlefield were attacking newspapers on the home front.3 The common feature of the newspapers that suffered attack by these soldier mobs was an allegiance to the Democratic Party. American newspapers of the war years were heavily partisan, with almost all local newspapers being affiliated with either the Democrats or the recently formed Republicans. This partisan association was often the result of some sort of formal affiliation, but the exact relationship between the publisher and the party was not always clear, and the line between editor and politician could be blurry.4 During the Civil War most Democrats supported the war effort despite opposing the Republican Lincoln administration. As the war dragged on however, the existence of a borderline treasonous peace faction within the 3 John Nerone, Violence Against the Press: Policing the Public Sphere in U.S. History (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1994), 226-230. Nerone catalogues 111 mob attacks on presses during the Civil War, the majority of which were perpetrated by civilians. Due to several factors that make the recording and definition of mob action difficult and ambiguous (size, threats or violence done, and recording of an incident could all vary widely depending on time and place) it seems likely that continued study will lengthen this list. Contemporaries did not offer a specific definition of what they considered to be a mob, and the word was used frequently to describe a range of similar behaviors. David Grimstead offers a useful definition of mob action for historians of nineteenth-century American history: "incidents where six or more people band together to enforce their will publicly by threatening or perpetrating physical injury to persons or property extralegally, ostensibly to correct problems or injustices within their society without challenging its basic structures," David Grimstead, American Mobbing: 1828-1861: Toward Civil War (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1998), xii. For an account of press violence in the revolutionary and early republic periods see Nerone, 18-83. 4 U.S. Census Bureau, The Seventh Census of the United States (Washington, 1850), lxv. A census report calculates that 73% of newspapers published in the 1860 were politically oriented, and that 52% were overtly partisan. These percentages account for the number of published issues which may underrate their exposure, as individual copies frequently changed hands or were read aloud to groups. For a recent account of the role of the press during the Civil War Era with a focus on the major New York papers, see Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 2 Democratic Party contributed to increasingly frequent accusations of disloyalty against the Democrats. This faction, nicknamed Copperheads, drew almost unanimous ire from Union soldiers, who felt that the existence and strength of such a cowardly movement dangerously undercut their mission to put down the rebellion. It was not uncommon for soldiers to remark that when the war was done, they wished to do worse to those traitors at home than they had to the rebels in the field.5 The Copperheads constituted the most stalwart anti-war political force in the North. Their moniker, foisted upon them to deliberately connote a treacherous snake, became a common epithet among Northerners and soldiers especially, for those deemed unsupportive of the war effort. For their part, Copperheads defined themselves as conservatives seeking a return to the status quo antebellum and a commitment to three issues in particular: an immediate peace, protection for civil liberties, and opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation The number of “true believer” Copperheads—those who were implacably furious about wartime habeas corpus suspensions, press censorship by the army, the draft, and the Emancipation Proclamation—was likely quite small. Those few were often loud and vituperative however and cast a large shadow in the minds of pro-war Northerners. It was not uncommon for pro-war Northerners to openly advocate the arrest and suppression of those who espoused Copperhead opinions. Many Democratic soldiers who voted against the party ticket (or at least refused to vote for it) cited the 5 Jenifer Weber in Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2006), 69-70, argues that soldiers’ increasing frustration with Copperheads started following the fall 1862 elections in which Democrats picked up thirty-two congressional seats, and several state legislatures and governorships. This is congruent with the temporal distribution of the soldier mobs studied here which saw a significant increase in the late winter/spring of 1863, see Figure 2 (page 24). For an alternative interpretation of post-1862 Republican fear and frustration with Democratic electoral success in the Midwest (the region that experienced most soldier mob attacks), see Brett Barker, “Limiting Dissent in the Midwest: Ohio Republicans’ Attacks on the Democratic Press,” in Ginette Aley and J.L. Anderson ed., Union Heartland: The Midwestern Homefront During the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 169-190. 3 Copperheads on the home front as the reason for temporarily abandoning their party. Historians such as Frank Klement and more recently Jennifer Weber have discussed the Copperheads at length; for the purposes of this essay the most relevant aspect of this faction is its role in the popular and political consciousness of the time, and the degree to which the papers that were mobbed exhibited the Copperhead sympathies so often attributed to them.6 The author is aware of forty-one instances of wartime mob attacks in which Union soldiers composed the entirety or a substantial majority of a mob attacking a Northern newspaper. These attacks could take a variety of forms, including the destruction of an office, arson, demands that a flag be displayed, or threats of future violence—but threats and office destruction were by far the most common. These attacks, like the Copperheads themselves, were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Midwest. Twenty-eight occurred in the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, with Ohio and Indiana experiencing the greatest number by far. Ohio, which saw the most with fourteen, was the home of Copperhead headman (and 1863 Ohio gubernatorial-candidate-in-exile) Clement L. Vallandigham, as well as Copperhead congressman and Democrat 1864 vice presidential candidate George Pendleton, and newspaper editor turned Copperhead congressman Samuel S. Cox. Indiana, the site of the second most attacks with nine, saw intense partisan conflict during the war as relations between the Democratic legislature and Republican Governor Oliver Morton broke down to such a degree that the legislature refused to pass any appropriations bills, and Morton ran the state using federal and private money for the duration of the war. These attacks overwhelmingly took place in highly partisan political 6 Jonathan White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 35-36. For a cogent summary of Copperhead historiography see Thomas E. Rodgers, “Copperheads or a Respectable Minority: Current Approaches to the Study of Civil War-Era Democrats,” Indiana Magazine of History 109 (June 2013). 4 environments where the threat Democrats could pose to the war effort was obvious—something the soldiers, always hungry for political news, did not fail to notice.7 These mob attacks on Democratic newspapers by northern soldiers carried political implications for both the attackers and the victims.

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